Location: 115 Central Park West between 71st
and 72nd Streets, New York, New York
Architect: Irwin S. Chanin, Jacques Delamarre, Director
Date Completed: 1930
After the 1929 stock market crash, fortunes and styles changed overnight. No example
could be a clearer illustration of this sobering up than the Majestic Apartments.
The Majestic was originally designed with an opulent exterior of sleek sharp lines,
dramatic corner windows, and twin tower tops meant to appear as abstract sculpture.
The interior, on the other hand, was planned to contain lavish Old World style eleven to
twenty-four room apartments.
The Majestic's steel work had been only partially erected when the market fell, and Chanin
and Delamarre quickly reworked their building into an assortment of smaller, less opulent
three to eleven room units.
Construction methods new to the times were used in the building of the Majestic
Apartments. There was a new form of concrete construction that eliminated the need for
beam drops in ceilings. Cantilevered floor slabs now eliminated the need for corner
columns, allowing for wrap around windows and wider terraces.
Inside, Chanin and Delamarre has some new ideas too. The times had changed, seemingly
overnight. Opulence was out, simplicity, or rather a dignified order, was in. Architects
and the general population alike had to consider something written some fifty years prior
by William Morris.
"Believe me," Morris wrote, "if we want art to begin at home, as it must,
we must clear our houses of troublesome superfluities that are forever in our way;
conventional comforts that are no real comforts, and do but make work for servants and
doctors; if you want the golden rule that will fit everything, that is it: have nothing in
your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."
The Majestic, along with the Century, redefined how the affluent could live.
"The apartment," the Majestic's floor plans said, "is not an enclosed,
comprehensive environment, but a sensible foothold in a larger, exciting one."
Majestic Apartments
